Homewood-Flossmoor High School graduate Aria Harrell spent this spring break, her college freshman year, in Guatemala pursuing her passion for creating meaningful and impactful stories through filmmaking.
The short documentary film the 19-year-old cowrote and produced as part of a team of University of Miami undergraduate students was accepted into the Tokyo International Short Film festival, where it will be shown and has received an invitation to premiere. The group is also waiting to hear whether the film was selected into the Cannes Film Awards festival.
The documentary, “Respirando Vida Nueva,” which translates as Breathing New Life, spotlights the damage to health and the environment caused by the use of open firewood stoves in the small quarters where residents live. It tells the story of Marco Tulio Guerra’s efforts to combat the problem as founder of Ecocomal, a company that sells an eco-friendly alternative stove. The company’s mission is to develop, produce and promote appropriate technology for the responsible use and management of energy resources.
“Anyone who watches the film will immediately see a woman cooking in her kitchen with a bunch of smoke,” Harrell said. “She’s cooking over what looks like an open fire pit. The issue with that is carbon emissions. Too much causes respiratory problems. It causes a lot of long-term problems with pregnancies. It’s really detrimental to their health and kids.”
The problem isn’t confined to Guatemala, she said.
“Marco’s stove is a way to combat that,” she said.
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His efforts can have a significant effect on the quality of air and life for millions of people in the country and shows the power of individuals to make a positive difference in their community, said those who worked on the project.
Harrell, whose major is motion picture business with a minor in interactive media and psychology, learned of the opportunity to travel to Guatemala from one her professors, Sanjeev Chatterjee. His documentary work has won top awards internationally.
The makers of the film include students Manuel Rubio, co-writer and director; Wesley Huggett, director of photography and sound; Jamari King, second unit director of photography and sound; and Nolan Slate, who scored the project.
The documentary is not Harrell’s first work in the film industry. I wrote about her in 2021, after she starred in an international film at the Sundance Film Festival Director’s Lab while she was still a student at Homewood- Flossmoor. At Sundance, she received coaching from Robert Redford, Ed Harris and Sanaa Lathan.
After attending Sundance, she co-starred in the 12-minute short film “Six Pack” directed by Rita Usher, which premiered at the 2020 International Noir Film Festival and won Best in Category.
That same year, Harrell premiered her first short film, “Amber,” to bring attention to the issue of human trafficking. The film won a 2021 ConnectHER Film Festival award for best production. It was shown at a virtual forum held last year by U.S. Rep. Robin Kelly and the Congressional Caucus on Black Women and Girls. The forum was on missing Black women and girls from the Chicago metropolitan area.
Last summer, Harrell interned with Peabody award winning director and Emmy Award winning producer and writer Rita Coburn at Coburn’s RCW Media Productions Inc.
The Guatemala project was part of a new University of Miami documentary master of fine arts program, said Chatterjee. Funding made it possible for undergraduate students to participate and produce their film.
“They did a brilliant job,” he said. “I think in a project like this, it’s easy to try to say too many things. They were able to not only deliver a film that is of fairly high technical quality, but it’s very well-focused and on message.”
In most cases in a film school, when a film is made as a class project, it remains a class project and doesn’t really get seen outside, he said. But “the aspiration for a film right from the beginning was that you will make a film that will be seen beyond the four walls of the classroom,” he said.
And that’s now going to happen in Tokyo and perhaps elsewhere, “so it’s been successful,” Chatterjee said. “At the international level, people are asking for it.”
After getting assigned the role as producer, Harrell said she worked alongside Rubio.
“We spent days, weeks, hours writing the script and meeting with Marco trying to develop the most authentic story,” she said.
Flossmoor resident Coburn, along with Golden Globe winner and Academy Award nominee Harris, provided statements for the trailer.
“‘Respirando Vida Nueva’ is an important documentary about a little-known health problem in Guatemala,” Harris said in the trailer.
“This issue and the beauty of Guatemala are all captured in this well-developed documentary,” Coburn said in her statement.
Harris said in an interview he was impressed with Harrell’s work on the documentary and highlighting social issues.
“She’s really smart. I think she has a good imagination, and she gives a damn,” he said.
Coburn believes Harrell has what it takes to be a successful producer and director in the challenging industry. She told me Harrell’s strengths include her work ethic and creativity. She helped craft a very informative film that “left the Indigenous people of the country intact,” Coburn said. “It didn’t diminish what was happening to them. It showed you what they had to go through and that takes a vision.”
Harrell is working to raise money to help bring the film to larger audiences and to help Marco pursue his mission.
She said the project offered her the opportunity to grow as a filmmaker.
She noted she gravitates toward films “that really make you think about life, and they also show a different perspective on why we’re here and what our purpose is. I think that that’s so valuable.”
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Francine Knowles is a freelance columnist for the Daily Southtown.